Penélope Cruz interview for Broken Embraces

After burning her fingers on a series of ill-judged Hollywood films, Penélope
Cruz is back doing what she does best - smouldering studies in barely
contained passion for her favourite director, Pedro Almodóvar. She reveals
what fuels her performances.

Broken Embraces, the flamboyant new film from Pedro Almodóvar, opens with an intimate sequence of what the great Spanish director calls 'stolen and furtive images’ of his star, Penélope Cruz, gearing up to perform one of the movie’s most emotional moments. 'I didn’t even know he was shooting,’ Cruz says, looking slightly miffed as she recalls this ingenious breach of film etiquette. 'So what you see there is actually a private moment of an actress preparing for a scene.’

In the surreptitious footage – a typically mischievous Almodóvar touch in a film that returns to his twin obsessions of filmmaking and family ties – Cruz, caught off-guard, appears unusually detached. Apparently oblivious to her co-star (Lluís Homar) standing right beside her, and to the technician hordes wielding cameras, booms and lights all around, she has the solitary, enigmatic air of a woman lost to her own concerns. 'In the next scene she’ll have to cry,’ Almodóvar offers by way of explanation, 'and I guess she’s getting in touch with her personal store of grief.’

At 35 Cruz is an actress whose best performances – from her sweaty, seductive debut as a prostitute’s daughter in Bigas Luna’s Jamón, Jamón (1992), to her Oscar-winning turn last year as an unhinged artist in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona – are defined by an extravagant passion, barely contained. As Almodóvar has it, she 'belongs to the Mediterranean school of actors, a style characterised by its carnality, gutsiness, shamelessness, messy hair, generous cleavage and shouting as a natural form of communication’. The idea that this daughter of a hairdresser and a shopkeeper, who rose with dreamlike ease from a working-class suburb of Madrid to become the first Spanish actress ever to bag an Oscar, may have a 'personal store of grief’ to consult feels improbable, almost unfeasible – until I meet her.

The moment she steps into the bar of the sea-front hotel in Barcelona elected for our interview, it becomes clear that Cruz is rather more complicated and more contained than the hot-headed, compulsive characters she portrays on screen. Unusually for an international film star, she arrives alone, without entourage, dressed unremarkably in blue jeans and a baggy white jumper. She walks bolt-upright like a head­mistress, as if balancing an imaginary orange on her head, and scowls more readily than she smiles. Her English, charmingly accented, is surprisingly hesitant; hampered less by a lack of linguistic competence than by a distrust of words – and of journalists. Photography, she will tell me later, is one of her private passions precisely because 'it doesn’t need language’.

Something about the solemnity of her demeanour reminds me of those stolen shots that begin Broken Embraces, a deliciously noirish film in which she plays the part of an actress who falls in love with her director. What, I ask, was she thinking about in that instant? A small furrow appears between her dark eyebrows and her voice drops to a whisper. 'It’s so intimate it’s hard to talk about that,’ she says. 'I always feel scared and insecure on a film set. I don’t know any other way.

'Most of the hours you spend on set, you are actually trying to find a way to hold on to the emotions of your character for the scene that you are about to shoot. Sometimes you will do a close-up for a scene in the morning where you are totally distraught, then shoot the rest of that scene seven hours later. How do you hang on to that feeling all day without burning up, without going so far that you have nothing left to give when the cameras roll again? That’s the crazy part of our work. That’s the part that people don’t see, that is a little bit like playing with fire.

'What I think about in those moments is one of my little secrets,’ she continues, gazing out of the hotel window towards the sea. 'And you have to have those secrets when you are working on a character that demands a lot emotionally.

I don’t think I’ve shared with anybody – not one person - a lot of the things I used in Vicky Cristina Barcelona or in Broken Embraces. They are things that I would not even tell my family. So it is hard for me to talk about.’

When, a few days later, I mention Cruz’s unexpected reticence to Almodóvar – the man who has coaxed more better performances from her than any other director – he is unsurprised. 'Penélope is very reserved,’ he says. 'It depends on the moment she’s living – when she’s in love she becomes so jealous of her privacy that she turns into a shy and unapproachable woman.’

Cruz prefers to pin the blame for her guardedness on the mass media: the photographers who track her around the world (and will, within hours of our interview, post online candid shots of her 'shopping in Barcelona’); the bloggers who pore over her relationship with her fellow Spanish actor Javier Bardem and speculate about whether, after these past two years together, they will marry or have children. 'The speed of news creates so much vertigo,’ she says cryptically, then adds with un­ambiguous clarity, 'I am a very private person.’ This is all very well, but it raises the question: why would someone so shy, someone so anxious to guard her private life from public scrutiny, pursue a career as an international film star? Because, she says, she had no choice. After her first brush with performance, in a dance class as a four-year-old girl, she was hooked.

'My parents sent me to ballet school because I had so much energy as a child, and they found me easier to control after I had been out moving and sweating for two hours,’ she says. 'That was my first contact with something related to art. I liked how

I felt being able to communicate feelings through something that was not words. I found I could communicate much more fully that way. I was only very young but it doesn’t matter how young you are, if you are going to be that passionate about something it doesn’t take long to recognise it.

'I think you almost get high – high in the best sense – when you are dancing many hours a day. You go through so much, and when you have to deal with that type of physical pain something happens that is almost spiritual, and I miss that feeling. I loved having bruises and blisters and all of that.’

She continued to attend ballet school daily until she was a teenager, but by that point film had overtaken dance in her affections. There was no cinema near her home in the Madrid suburb of Alcobendas, but in the evenings the Cruz family (her mother, Encarna, father, Eduardo, younger sister, Monica, and younger brother, Eduardo Jr) would make a ritual of gathering round the television and watching films on their Betamax video recorder.

'Watching movies took 100 per cent of my attention,’ she says, 'and apart from dance it was rare for me to find an activity that I could be totally, totally focused on at that stage, because I was all over the place. Around the same time I would play with my girlfriends, pretending to be somebody else and I started to notice that that feeling was like a drug for me. I was 11 when I first said I wanted to become an actress, and everyone looked at me as if I had said I wanted to go to the moon.’

She never had formal acting training; she learnt all she needed to know from what she saw on that Betamax – 'that’s when I discovered Billy Wilder, Audrey Hepburn, Almodóvar’ – and by sitting in her mother’s beauty salon, where, between the ages of five and 12, she would take up residence for a few hours after school each day. 'That was the best acting school for me,’ she says. 'I don’t know why but women in a hair salon share their deepest secrets. They would talk about their problems with their children, their parents, their marriages, divorces, affairs, insecurities. They would share everything with everybody,’ she laughs, incredulous at the openness of these women, so at odds with her own instinctive reticence. 'I would sit there and pretend I was doing my homework but actually I was observing all of those women. I would really pay attention to understand why they were the way they were. I was fascinated by them, and I think that is maybe why I got hooked so quickly into the world of Almodóvar, because [when I watched his films] I said to myself, I know these women. But how can he – a man! – know these women, our women, so well?’

She devoured his playful, outrageous, big-hearted films – Matador, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! – watching them first with her family, and then re-watching them alone four or five times. 'He was the artist that made me feel the most,’ she says. 'I identified with his way of seeing the world, the way he saw women. And as much as I wanted to work with him, I was also curious to meet the man, to get to know him.’

When she heard he was filming High Heels in Madrid in 1990, she sneaked on to the set. 'I don’t know how I managed to slip by the monitor but nobody threw me out,’ she says, tugging at a stray lock of hair. 'I think about that and it feels like yesterday because for me it was huge to be on that set watching Almodóvar at work.’ I ask what she said to him that day and she looks aghast. 'I never talked to him, of course! I was only 15.’

Two years later she was back on a film set, this time – having secured herself an agent and sailed through her first audition – as the gorgeous, volatile star of Jamón, Jamón, opposite a priapic Javier Bardem. Almodóvar saw the film, admired her performance, and rang her to tell her so. 'I have every second of that moment recorded in my brain,’ she says. 'I remember every smell, every sound, everything. I was so nervous I was shaking. And he told me, I will write you a character that will fit you like a glove. Hearing that from him was one of the best moments of my entire career.’

In 1997 Almodóvar gave Cruz a cameo in the opening scene of Live Flesh, as a young girl who gives birth on a bus. Two years after that he cast her for a second time, in All About My Mother, the film widely considered to be his masterpiece. Cruz once again played an expectant mother ('I feel Penélope is very maternal,’ Almodóvar says. 'When we’re walking down the street and she sees a baby, even if she doesn’t know the parents, she forgets her shyness and she runs up to play with it’). Only this time, she had a more substantial role, as a nun who becomes pregnant after a one-night stand with a transsexual drug addict. Between them Cruz and Almodóvar made this most unlikely character not only believable, but also deeply sympathetic. The film won the Oscar for best foreign film, and Hollywood came knocking for Cruz.

Over the next two years, in quick succession, she racked up English-language appearances in four would-be blockbusters opposite a quartet of leading male stars: All the Pretty Horses with Matt Damon; Blow with Johnny Depp; Captain Corelli’s Mandolin with Nicolas Cage; and Vanilla Sky with Tom Cruise. Kevin Loader, a producer on Captain Corelli, says at the time Cruz struck him as 'very natural and unguarded, without a trace of Hollywood nonsense to her’. She arrived on set on the Greek island of Cephalonia, he recalls, 'rather endearingly carrying in her holdall a stray kitten that she’d found in Madrid’. Instead of bringing along a team of personal assistants and stylists, she had only her mother and brother in tow. 'Eduardo was a very good-looking teenager at the time and cut a swath through the girls on the island,’ Loader says. As for Cruz herself, he says, 'She makes a profound impact on all the men she works with – let’s put it like that – and was already taking calls from a lot of her previous co-stars.’

It was the night of that film’s Los Angeles premiere in 2001, when she stepped out publicly for the first time with her Vanilla Sky co-star Tom Cruise (whose marriage to Nicole Kidman had recently collapsed), that Cruz truly became a household name. 'Can you ever be ready for that kind of celebrity?’ Loader asks. 'In a weird way I think she wanted it: to feel that the flashbulbs are popping when you step on to the red carpet is something that all actresses with ambition aspire to. But there is a level of press intrusion that comes with being Tom Cruise’s girlfriend that probably nobody would really want.’

Although she shies away from going into the specifics of her relationship with Cruise, which ended in 2004, Cruz identifies that as the time that things started to travel 'at a speed where you don’t experience anything, where nothing counts. I learnt how it feels to have no time to yourself, to be left with nothing to give. After making four movies a year for many years you feel like you have chronic exhaustion and that is not good.’ Some of the big-budget films she made in that era, the likes of Gothika and Sahara, looked like terrible lapses of judgment but Cruz insists that 'every movie that I’ve done since I was 17 counts for me: the ones that are good; the ones that are bad.’

These past few years, since Almodóvar brought her back from what he refers to as 'a long period wandering in the wilderness… in a series of American movies that didn’t work’ to star in Volver, the film that earned her a first Oscar nomination, she has chosen her English-speaking roles with rather more success. She was elegant and subtle last year in the Philip Roth adaptation Elegy; then, in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, once again playing opposite Bardem, she gave a performance of such febrile intensity that her female co-stars, Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall, looked pale and wooden by comparison. 'I had no idea what I was doing with that character,’ Cruz says. 'Everything goes so fast on a Woody Allen set. My whole performance was shot in less than four weeks, and I was crying and screaming for the whole time. It was a great adventure.’

More than that, it secured her an Oscar, a year after Bardem had become the first Spanish actor to win one, for No Country for Old Men. 'The fact that we won one year after the other is unbelievable,’ Cruz says. 'It’s a big, big, big, big coincidence. We started our careers together, in Jamón, Jamón, and to win two years in a row, it’s amazing. It’s like too good to be true.’ She pauses, then smiles with rare enthusiasm. 'But it is true.’ She says that even now she sometimes struggles to believe it. The statuette, standing gleaming in her home in Madrid, will catch her unawares and she will think, 'Oh my God, what is that? Is it mine? When did that happen? How did that happen?’

Whatever the reason, without it she would surely have felt out of place on the set of Nine, Rob Marshall’s forthcoming musical, inspired by Fellini’s 84, which finished filming earlier this year. It boasts a cast almost entirely populated by Oscar winners, including Daniel Day-Lewis, Sophia Loren, Judi Dench, Nicole Kidman and Marion Cotillard. Cruz talks with great fondness about the camaraderie on set. 'Every day we’d have lunch together,’ she says, 'and all of us girls would bombard Sophia [Loren] with questions about Mastroianni and Fellini. She was always looking at my plate complaining I wasn’t eating enough.’

Working alongside such seasoned actresses as Dench and Loren led Cruz to reflect on her own career. She came to the conclusion, she says, that 'getting older doesn’t make me want to work more, it makes me want to be more careful about the work I choose, because I want to have a long-term career. In all the madness [of the film industry] you have to find your own way so you can still be a bit of an artisan with your work, which is one reason I have decided to do only one movie a year from now on. I haven’t stopped for years, and I need a little time for myself.’

She won’t be drawn on the exact nature of her future plans, but she makes it clear that, should the opportunity arise, she would sign up for another Almodóvar film without a moment’s hesitation. She would be a fool not to: as Broken Embraces once again proves, he brings out the best in her; in his films, more than any others, she seems liberated, appearing to gain a dimension in the transition from life to screen. 'I love him, and I love working with him,’ she says simply. The feeling is clearly mutual. 'With me she takes risks with no sense of restraint,’ Almodóvar says. 'She would do anything I ask. But even I’m impressed by the faith she places in me; she believes in me far more than I do myself. And that gives us both a lot of strength.’